Blogocentric Formulations

Who died and made you king of anything?

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DAY 14

Song: "King of Anything"
Artist: Sara Bareilles
Album: Kaleidoscope Heart (2010)

This was the first song that I ever listened to on iTunes more than 100 times in one week. As mentioned in earlier blog posts, I tend to have a bit of an obsessive music personality, where I'll latch on a song and listen to it on repeat for a few days at a time. In most cases I'll take breaks and switch to something else for a few minutes, or even listen to a podcast or audiobook to break things up a little, but I loved this song so much when I first heard it that I literally had it on repeat for my entire commute for multiple days in a row. The result was over 100 listens in the first several days of downloading it.

What I particularly like about the song is that, as Sara Bareilles has mentioned, it's an angry song about someone trying to control your life, but it's played and presented in such an upbeat, positive way that you can't help but tap your toes and even sing along with it. I'm not really a musician of any sort so I can only speculate, but I imagine it's pretty darn hard to write a song that says one thing and has a tone that sounds completely opposite. That's hard enough to accomplish in writing; I can only imagine how much tougher it is to accomplish when you also have to set it to music!

I think Kaleidoscope Heart is a great album overall, with a bunch of great songs on it. In addition to "King of Anything," I also highly recommend "Uncharted." "Basket Case" is pretty good too, but the other two are my clear favorites on the album.